American Hitchhiker, American Heart

He’s doing it. Sean’s* hitchhiking from the middle of America to the Atlantic Ocean.

He left Iowa on Sunday. He’s 24, my former student, a writer. Smart, funny, serious. Tough, hopeful, cynical, vulnerable.

Yes, he’s read Kerouac’s On the Road.

He’s an Iraq war vet-- 2 combat tours, single dad of two boys, a son, a brother, a former Marine.

He currently works as a prison guard in a Midwestern state. Not his first choice of a job, but in this economy, it’s just that, a job. He doesn’t complain. He took the week off from work for this trip.

Sean is staying in daily contact with some friends through Facebook, with brief updates of where he is, how many times a day he was picked up by cops, what rides he got, where he slept.

His mission of discovery asks one big question that has many parts. The big question is—does anyone in America have the heart to take a crazy risk?

The smaller parts of the big question: who will pick up the tall, scruffy, blond guy with the backpack? Will they leave him by the side of the road, cover him with dust, rain, condescension? Refuse to even look at him? Lock him up in jail? Rob him, beat him, leave him in a ditch? Will they take a chance on Sean? Will they fear him?

Sean’s journey makes me look at myself. No way would I pick up a strange hitchhiker of any description, at any time. Well, at least I doubt it greatly. That lesson was drilled in to me at a young age.

Yet I’ll never forget the day my mother, who was 50 at the time, came home and said something about the hitchhiker she’d picked up.

Teenager that I was, I flipped out. How could she pick up a stranger?

“Oh,” she said, “he was just a boy. A college kid, probably. And it was starting to rain.”

How many hitchhikers has my mother picked up in her lifetime? Is she still picking them up? I don’t even want to know. She has a huge heart, but I want her to be safe. Let other people take the risks, is my uncharitable attitude.

But what about Sean?

I’m conflicted. How can I hope or expect other people do what I wouldn’t do? Stop and give Sean a ride? I can’t make any sense of it.

But I want Sean to succeed, to get to New York, to the Atlantic Ocean, to find what he’s looking for. To write a great novel out of the experience, even if that wasn’t his intention. To get home safely to the Midwest.

He’s only trying to find out about America’s heart.

What would you do if you saw Sean on the road? Do you ever, or never, pick up hitchhikers? Have you ever been the hitchhiker, looking for a lift?

*Sean is not his real name.

Melanie

Soup, soup, glorious soup!

I was thinking about soup this morning, and decided I am a soup snob.

Ah, soup. Surely it was one of the first foods cooked by early man, after the bloody haunch of giant elk began to get monotonous. Some soups can qualify as super-foods, with all the vitamins, minerals, and anti-oxidants any nutritionist could ask for.

Soups can be humble, yet unmatched in deliciousness. It doesn’t have to take a lot of expensive ingredients to make soup, so they can be extremely economical while feeding a crowd. Of course I’m not opposed to elegant ingredients such as nice herbs, crab or wine. I grow a few of my own herbs, and I am lucky to live near the coast where I can catch my own crab-- or get it fairly cheap at the fish market. The wine used in a soup doesn’t have to cost more than a few dollars a bottle.

I was a sous chef in a restaurant many years ago, and I learned to make truly great soups. Not just blowing my own horn—I have a gift when it comes to making good soup. My soups get raves from friends and family. They beg me to make soup. I even dream about leaving teaching for a career operating a soup truck.

Have to say, with the general warmth of menopause, I haven’t made a whole lot of soup lately, but when the weather cools a bit, I’ll get back into soup mode. I don’t have much choice.

The problem is, because I have an intimate knowledge and understanding of good soup, I can’t order soup in a restaurant. Most restaurants, I am sad to say, turn out salty, glumpy, inedible, sorry excuses for soup.

I’ve found I should not even try to eat restaurant soup. It only hurts my feelings when I dip my spoon in hopefully, only to taste salt, maybe some flour, and little else. Many restaurants are serving soup literally dumped straight from a can into the soup warmer. Can the downfall of civilization be far behind?

This makes me morose, because if I want soup, now I have to make it myself. I’d like to be treated to a bowl of soup that I didn’t have to make with my own large and capable hands. But I can’t lower my soup standards! I’d rather do without.

How about you? Are you a snob about any foods, refusing to accept anything less than your standard of deliciousness or the brand you insist is the best? 

Clams

I set myself the goal of NOT complaining in my next blog post.

So this may possibly be the weirdest post you've ever read. That is, if you don't like clams.

Most people have a strong opinion about clams. The innocent clam has inspired a lot of haters.

But...

I love clams.

I like other shellfish, too, but clams are excellent.

It may have something to do with my ancestry. Lots of coastal people hanging around up there in the family tree. Fishermen/women. Some of the foremothers and forefathers were glad to get anything they could to eat, even if it was clams they dug from the mud themselves!

Dad is from a tiny spit of land called the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The Chesapeake Bay is on one side, the Atlantic Ocean is on the other. The air is salty and so are the clams.

Mother, not from there, calls it the Land that Time Forgot. Definitely an out-of-the-way place! Dad's family came over from coastal England, oh, about 1650. I joke that they were thrown off the prison ship (that really happened to some folks in the 17^th century) and never looked back. They probably started digging clams after swimming to shore.

Mom's side of the family includes some coastal Irish people, along with some thrifty German and French folk. I bet they all ate clams.

I eat clams any way I can get them, and typically to excess. This weekend, my husband came home with 50 fresh medium clams from a good local fish house. What a man!

We ate them. They were superb, a breath of the ocean, of summer.

Ah, clams. I get misty just thinking about them.

Do you have a favorite food that not everyone understands?

Bossy!

I grew up with a bossy father. He's now almost 87, and I'm 54. He's still bossing me.

Dad was a corporal in the Marine Corps during WW II, but when his five children were still living at home, we called him the General behind his back. We were his little troops. He ran us ragged, we thought.

For example, we had a pop-up travel camper that we traveled up and down the Eastern seaboard with in the summers. The camper top was made from tent canvas, with aluminum poles that needed to be put up, and snaps that needed to be fastened.  

When we pulled in to a state park campground at dusk, after traveling all day in our 1966 black Valiant station-wagon (hotter than blazes), Dad assembled us. He barked out the orders, and we scrambled. Tired, hungry, our young fingers fumbled with poles and snaps, the mosquitoes hummed and bit. Dad got redder in the face by the minute. Bossy? He defined the word.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, we had the camper up, could get some grub, and get to sleep. Putting up and taking down the camper was dreaded by us all. The General micromanaged us to the brink of anxiety attacks, if we had known what anxiety attacks were in those days.

Years later, my sister and I put the camper up by ourselves one evening. Without the barking of the General, we managed to raise the camper top in ten minutes without a cross word. We were astonished that it was so easy to do when the General was not shouting directions. Here that, all you bossy folk?

His bossiness and iron will meant corporal punishment was unknown and completely unneeded in our family. One pointed look from the General, and we stopped in our tracks. He ruled supreme-- I doubt there was ever a dad who commanded more obedience from his children with so little effort. Not that we were always model children, far from it, but when he was around, we did what we were told!  

Anything less than compliance, and quickly, was fruitless. Rebellion? We thought about it. We grumbled plenty behind his back, but resistance seemed not only futile, but suicidal, even though he never laid a hand on us. I still marvel at the immensity of the power he wielded over us.

Now Dad and Mom live five minutes from me, and hundreds to thousands of miles from the other four children. This means that Dad has only Mom, me, and occasionally my long-suffering husband to boss around, and oh lawd, he does he have fun bossing us.

Of course I'm braver now that I've realized that he can't really shoot death rays from his eyes. I've even said to him several times, “You're being bossy!” He only shakes his head at this treasonous behavior. I think I've even seen him hide a smile at my too little, too late attempts at insurrection.

He knows I am powerless to resist. I will eat the meal he insists I eat when I'm not hungry, I will “sit down and rest” at his command, I will get him the glass of iced tea, I will fix the TV remote. His bossiness knows no bounds, and may be one of his most treasured daily activities as his health gradually declines.

Once bossy, always bossy. The frightening part is I find myself bossing my students around as though it were second nature to me. Ah, how sweet it is for the perennially bossed to be able to boss minions of our own.

Menopause bites

Menopause bites, and I have the hickey to prove it.

I have medium fair skin with sun damage (hey, in the seventies we hadn’t even heard of worrying about our skin’s future after sun damage). Now in the early stages of meno, my neck and upper chest look like they’ve been gnawed on by chipmunks. I just started noticing the redness over the past few months, but I think it’s been going on for a while now and I’d just ignored it, thought it was sunburn or a slight flushing from exertion. 

Then I realized I hadn’t been out in the sun. My latest exertion doesn’t go much beyond climbing a couple of flights of stairs. It’s not sunburn or flushing, and it shows no signs of going away. 

It’s not itchy, not flaky, (thank goodness for small favors), just red, blotchy and unappealing.

Menopause has already made me humble about my appearance, and now this.

Isn’t it enough that although my weight is the same, my waist has disappeared? Can’t menopause be satisfied with the plain old age spots on my hands and cheeks? Must my sagging jaw line now compete with the neon signage of the red blotches on my chest that scream “She’s in menopause! Ha-ha-ha! Look at that tomato skin!”

Some women might say, “Oh, just put a turtleneck on and forget it!” Point well-taken, but living in the South and already being “warm” in general from roller-coaster hormones has me unwilling to turtleneck-it. What have I got to be ashamed of?

So I’m going to brash it out. The plan: wear my usual v-necks, and dare anyone to look twice at me, yes, getting my glow on. 

Go ahead, I just dare ya.

Menopause meets an earthquake.

I was in a webinar on the second floor of our library with about 15 other people when the earthquake hit coastal North Carolina and the community college campus where I work. We are in a town with several military bases.

What went through my mind when the room started to sway, buck, and roll:

1.      I’m having a “spell”

2.      My meds are going haywire

3.      We’re under attack

4.      I didn’t hear any explosion

5.      The power is still on, so it can’t be Armageddon

6.      The other people in the room are feeling it too

7.      I’m going to fall off my chair

8.      When is this going to stop

9.      This is too quiet to be an earthquake

10.   Where’s the nearest nuclear plant

11.   I’m freaking out, the room is closing in on me

12.   Are we really going to sit here like nothing happened?

By this time the woman leading the webinar realized something was up and we weren’t paying any attention to her. Our building is shaking, we told her.

Her location is Manhattan, next to Madison Square Garden.

Then she said her building was shaking, too, and we heard fire alarms going off in the background. She apologized for the noise and went on with the webinar. Knowing New York was shaking too, was frankly terrifying to me. I was thinking multiple attacks near the 10-year anniversary of 9/11.

We asked her: Don’t you need to leave your building if the fire alarms are going off? Nah, she said, and kept going with her presentation. One tough cookie. Or a person in deep denial.

I never absorbed another word from her for the next 10 minutes. Just sat there trying not to freak out any more than I already was. FINALLY, we left the building. When we got outside, a student told us there had been an earthquake in Virginia.

This might not seem like good news, but compared to what I had been thinking, it was a huge relief. Thankfully, it seems that no one was seriously hurt.

LESSON LEARNED: Don’t wait for permission to leave if the building is shaking for any reason. Evacuate the building. Get the heck out of there!

Hopefully I won’t have to put this lesson learned into effect for another 50 years. Now, let me check the weather channel to see when hurricane Irene is due to arrive!

Murder by Menopause

Top 10 people, events, and things I almost committed murder over, even if I wasn't sure whom to murder.

Brought to you by menopause.

1. the young lady in the supermarket who blocked the whole 2-cart-wide aisle while she debated interminably over potato chips and ignored me trying to push my cart down the aisle on a day I was exceedingly exhausted and did not want to be in the supermarket in the first place
2. the hairy guy in the huge white pickup truck who flipped me the bird. Why, you ask? I had the audacity to signal I was going to make a left turn, causing him to have to slow down slightly for 3 seconds
3. the pimple on my 54 year-old chin
4. the neighbors behind me who have every square inch of their yard covered with plastic toys and swings and slides that their children never play with, but I have to look at every day. I know, I know, free country, blah, blah, blah.
5. the person who does not respond to my smile and hello but walks by me like I'm invisible. I want to stick my leg out and trip her as she goes by with her nose in the air. Yes, are you amazed by my emotional maturity?
6. the college students on my campus—COLLEGE STUDENTS-- who cough and hack and then with full p-tuie sound effects SPIT a huge wad of mucous out on the sidewalk just a few feet away from me and my sandal-clad feet. Isn't there an ordinance from about the year 1790 that says “don't spit on the sidewalk?” Am I wrong to expect common sense from anyone at any time?
7. the same as above who spit their chewing gum on the sidewalk where in about 1,000 years it may finally decompose
8. the same as above who bypass the convenient outside cigarette butt collectors, jauntily flipping their butts on the ground outside the doors to campus buildings where they will remain for 25 years or until someone making minimum wage comes along to sweep the butts up. Perhaps throwing their trash on the ground for another person to pick up is their way of putting America back to work?
9. the girl talking on the cell phone in the bathroom stall who then leaves the bathroom without washing her hands. Was she raised by wolves? Sorry, wolves. Didn't mean to insult you.
10. using the last pill in my pack of Prempro.
    Don't worry, my husband took my bullets away.